By Paul Clolery

The theme of the National Conference on Volunteering and Service going on in New York City is “It's Up To You,” yet the call is not so much about increasing the sheer number of volunteers as it is finding the most effective people and measuring results.

Volunteering is no longer for the weekend do-gooder. That fluffy image will be a faint, quaint memory to many of the nearly 6,000 service leaders gathered at the Hilton and Sheraton hotels. A process that has been going on for the past 18 months, called Reimagining Service, seeks to put in place an infrastructure for developing the best service leaders and then holding them to account for results.

There are four principles to the project:

• Making volunteering fundamental, not an add-on;

• Volunteering changes the core economics of organizations;

• Don't let supply dictate your volunteer programs; and,

• To get a return, you have to invest.

A group of five leaders discussed the research that has been done in support of reimaginingservice.org. They were: Aaron Hurst, president and founder of the Taproot Foundation; Julie Quinn, director, Deloitte Consulting; James Weinberg, founder and CEO of CommonGood Careers; Peter York, senior vice president for research and evaluation at the TCC Group; and Bobbi Silten, chief foundation officer at The Gap.

Evan Hochberg, national director of community involvement at Deloitte, also is a leader of the project. Deloitte committed $1 million in pro bono work to the Reimaginging Service initiative as part of its $50 million commitment to pro bono service for nonprofits.

The idea under the first principle is to use volunteers to fundamentally increase the ability to achieve strategic objectives and advance the social mission. There are service enterprises and corporate service enterprises. The corporate model, for example, applies core competencies to create impact.

Under the second principle, service enterprises have impact beyond cash resources. Business service enterprises deploy employee volunteers based on skill sets, thus causing a multipler impact.

In not letting supply dictate volunteers programs, the analogy was made that a business doesn't hire everyone who walks in the door. Hires are made based on skill sets and service enterprises should likewise be selective.

The final principle is that organizations can get three to six times the value out of a volunteer than the cost to manage them. The key is to be willing to invest in that management.

Research collected by and performed for reimagingservice.org shows that 70 percent of 300 respondents turn away volunteers. And, 88 percent of those poll respondents said that they were not at capacity for volunteers. Some 50 percent of nonprofits use 50 or more volunteers but management of those people seems to get worse as organizational revenue grows past $1 million. The research also showed organizations with 10 to 50 volunteers were as effective as organizations with no volunteers.

Much of the research is available at www.reimagingingservice.org